Intereting article about e-mail/telehealth in the middle east
While there is no doubt that political stability and public health are immensely important in improving a nation’s health, patients become ill regardless and doctors are needed to treat them. The outcome of the doctor-patient interaction is crucially important to the patient concerned, and a number of factors will optimize it, one of which is the expertise and training of that doctor in the patient’s specific complaint. Provision of the highest standard of medical care is the objective of those who work in the medical profession in the Middle East, as elsewhere, and these underpinning values do not change in times of conflict. For this reason, doctors’ knowledge needs to be upgraded continuously during their medical career. This is difficult to achieve in many parts of the developing world. In Iraq, for example, 13 years of strict international sanctions and three devastating wars in the last 25 years have not just destroyed or depleted the infrastructure but also made it extremely difficult for doctors to keep up with developments in their specialties. Despite their best personal efforts, their knowledge may not be sufficient to meet the high standards of medical practice they set for themselves and, consequently, some doctor-patient outcomes will be adversely affected.
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